Redondo Beach man will guide NASA's Curiosity to Mars landing

When NASA's Curiosity rover breaks through the atmosphere of Mars and enters the final descent of a journey stretching more than 350 million miles, guiding it down - so to speak - will be an engineering team led by Keith Comeaux, a Redondo Beach resident who has been working on the $2.5 billion science project for six years.

Comeaux will be flight director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Sunday night when the rover, about the size of a small car and stocked with research equipment, touches down on the rocky surface of the cold, red planet.

For Comeaux, Curiosity's mission to Mars is another milestone in a life marked by a fascination with flight and space travel.

"I was pretty young during the Apollo moon landings and I have a vague recollection of them," Comeaux said. "I remember my grandfather pulling me in a wagon when I was very young and we were pretending to go to the moon. It left an indelible mark on me."

The 45-year-old married father of twins, Max and Evie, worked on the rover through its development and construction.

Comeaux completed his doctorate degree in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford in 1995 and worked for Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo before joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work on Curiosity. He helped oversee Curiosity's November 2011 launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Fittingly, he will be there for the rover's landing.

"I was there when we first turned the computer on and I've seen it go through quite a lot," Comeaux said by phone from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility in La Ca ada Flintridge. "It's pretty rewarding to be here at the end of the road."

Since the launch, Curiosity has been traveling through space and is expected to approach the planet at a speed around 13,000 mph.

Comeaux's team is charged with a crucial job: getting the 2,000 pound rover gently down to the planet's surface.

The Cruise/Approach engineering operations team has spent that last few weeks checking landing systems in preparation for the tricky final descent.

Just before entering the atmosphere, the rover will separate from a capsule that carried it to the planet.

Curiosity will endure up to 12 G's as it flies through the atmosphere toward the planet. About 7 miles from the surface, a large parachute will deploy. When the rover is a mile from the surface, the parachute will be cut loose. A jet pack with eight rockets will then guide the rover farther down to the surface. About six stories in the air, the jet pack will release the rover on a 25-foot-long nylon tether.

The rover is then expected to hit the ground at a gentle 2mph.

"The (rover) is packed up into the air shell like a cocoon. After we land, it's going to be free of that and will really be able to stretch its legs and do what it's designed to do," Comeaux said. "A lot of us are looking forward to that."

Awaiting Curiosity on Mars will be the rover Opportunity, which landed in 2004 and is still functioning. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, ceased communicating in 2010.

Comeaux, a native of Baton Rouge, La, who earned a mechanical engineering degree from Louisiana State University before heading over to Stanford, has logged up to 80-hour workweeks through eight months preparing for Sunday's landing.

"We want to make sure it's ready for the big event on Sunday night," Comeaux said.

Since communication signals sent from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory travel at the speed of light - taking 28 minutes to relay information to the rover - the device is controlled through a set of instructions already punched in to its complex computer system.

The rover will maneuver to a landing spot in Gale Crater, about 10 miles away from the 15,000 foot Mount Sharp - taller than Mount Whitney. Once on the ground, Curiosity will begin beaming back high-definition color images to the engineers.

"By Sunday night there's very little we can do," he said. "We will be watching very keenly and responding to things as we see them."

Once on the ground, the rover will then be handed over to a surface operations team, which Comeaux will join.

Curiosity, mounted with 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, will then start searching the planet's cold surface for the building blocks of life, a journey that could stretch for two years - or longer.

"An exciting find would be to detect organic molecules present on Mars, a clue that life could have existed on mars and may exist even today," Comeaux said.